Legion of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

cries grew louder as more and more of the jet-black birds swooped down to the graveyard, their finger-like wing-tips scraping the needles of the yew trees as they came in to land. They perched at the ends of the spreading branches, which bowed under their weight, opened their great ebony-like beaks and screeched so loudly that the vicar had to raise his voice to be heard above the raucous cawing.
    There were two dozen of them – a haberdasher’s handful – and as I counted them, it seemed to me as if a thirteenth gang fromthe quays had arrived to pay its respects. They sat in a circle, their heads cocked and cold black eyes glinting as they watched the pallbearers lower the coffin down into the gaping hole.
    ‘Earth to earth,’ the vicar intoned, tossing a handful of claggy mud down on the lid of the coffin. ‘Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.’
    Heads bowed, we murmured a final prayer, and then it was over. The circle of mourners broke up, and gang members began to file away. I was about to follow them, when Will tugged the sleeve of my coat.
    ‘What are
they
doing?’ he hissed.
    I turned and looked back. Gravediggers had appeared, to shovel the mound of earth back into the grave. One of them, however, had climbed down onto the top of the coffin. I heard a soft jangling sound. Meanwhile, the second had thrust a long pole, its top curved like a shepherd’s crook, into the ground just to the left of the headstone, and was attachinga bell from the hook. The next moment, the first gravedigger re-emerged and climbed from the grave, a length of chain clasped in his hand.
    Ada had done her job well, I noted. I looked round at Will.
    ‘It’s an extra that the higher class of undertakers provide,’ I told him grimly. ‘Insurance against being buried alive.’
    I heard Will take a sharp intake of breath. The first gravedigger reached up and attached the gold ring at the end of the chain to the bell. The other end, I knew, was already looped round the Emperor’s right index finger. I nodded down into the grave.
    ‘It’s just in case the doctor has been a little hasty. If the dear departed wakes up in the coffin, he can pull on the chain, ring the bell, and the graveyard watchmen will dig him up again.’
    ‘Buried alive …’ Will breathed. ‘Can you
imagine
?’
    I couldn’t, and I didn’t want to. But I knew there were many who did. When sickness swept through the city – like the blackwater fever epidemic of a few years ago, or last summer’s outbreak of bloody flux – wiping out great swathes of the population, the overworked doctors hadn’t always been as scrupulous as they might have been. There had been more than a few stories of those who had been pronounced dead, only to wake up in pitch-black darkness six feet under. That was why those who could afford it paid for a finger-chain and bell to be attached. Some went even further. Theodore Boyle – a millionaire financier – had, on falling ill, changed his will, insisting that he be beheaded after his death and he had employed a samurai swordsman in advance to carry out the deed.
    ‘Come, Will,’ I said, clapping my hand on his shoulder. ‘Enough of these morbid thoughts. Let’s be off.’
    The pair of us turned to go. The graveyard had emptied quickly after the burial. The vicar had already gone, as had the funeral carriage, while the last of the mourners were hurrying through the arched entrance. We trudged after them through the wet grass, glancing back nervously over our shoulders as we wound our way between the centuries of graves. The ravens had stopped shrieking, but were still there, their black wings folded round their plump bodies making them look like a group of sinister black cowled monks.
    The next moment, as one, the entire flock clapped its wings and flapped up noisily into the air, the raucous cawing louder than ever. Leaving that eerie place, we turned onto the Belvedere Mile and climbed to the rooftop of a tea-importer’s warehouse.